


old friends

by sullypants



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Minor Archie Andrews/Veronica Lodge, Minor Betty Cooper/Reggie Mantle, Sexual Content, When Harry Met Sally AU, but a gal can aim, listen i’m no nora ephron, more honestly Antagonistic Acquaintances to Friends to Lovers but let’s not get technical
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-27
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-18 20:08:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29739204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sullypants/pseuds/sullypants
Summary: Jughead doesn’t make friends easily. Betty is nothing but friendly.Anyway, it’s about old friends.AWhen Harry Met Sally…au.
Relationships: Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones
Comments: 63
Kudos: 120





	old friends

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to loveleee, true to her name, and to arsenicpanda for her encouragement. Also to the good vibes club, without whom this probably would still be unfinished. 
> 
> Cue up _A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night_. Thank you, you’re welcome.

_The time to make up your mind about people is never._

_I._

It takes Jughead less than an hour to put his foot fully into his mouth, and now the only person he knows in a city of millions thinks he’s an asshole.

He knows himself. This tracks.

Jughead doesn’t really have friends. He has Archie, he has Jellybean, and he has Joani. But Joani is his girlfriend, so she doesn’t count.

These nuances, he thinks, are where things begin to go off the rails.

It’s through Joani—who knows someone named Ethel, who knows a guy named Dilton, who knows a girl driving to New York—that Jughead ends up spending eighteen hours in a car with a girl named Betty Cooper, who becomes merely the first in what will surely be tens of people who both call New York City home and despise him. It’s just his fate. He’s accepted it at this point.

Betty has a split-phone charger, an actual honest-to-god physical map of their route, and a box full of driving snacks so they don’t have to stop too often. She’s clearly thought this through, and Jughead feels like the slacker who’d thrown his father’s old Army duffle into her car’s trunk and dropped his laptop bag next to his dusty Converse on the floor of her pristine Volvo.

He can nearly smell the new-car aroma in this thing. 

So he tries to pull himself together, for the sake of not pissing his driver off enough that she might abandon him on the side of the road in, like, Indiana or something.

“Is this all you’re bringing?” he gestures to the duffle that sits neatly in the back seat. Betty shakes her head. 

“I sold most of my furniture via Craigslist and shipped everything else back to my parents’ house.” She shrugs. “Can’t ship the car though.”

Jughead can think of nothing to say in response and so simply nods. 

“So what’s in New York?” Betty asks him, and he raises his eyebrows in question. 

Her eyes flick between him and the road. “Why are you moving?” She spells it out, like he’s slow. 

“Oh—right. I’m uh, getting my MFA in creative writing at City College.”

Betty nods at the road. “Oh, yeah, I think Dilton mentioned that.”

Jughead nods in response, but is otherwise silent. _Is this awkward?_ , he thinks, but thank god—she continues. 

“I’m actually going to J-school,” she tells him, “Columbia.”

He nods again, grunts in acknowledgement. Then it is silent again, and he imagines the silence stretching out before him like Lake Michigan in winter, vast and frozen, and he begins to feel a kernel of panic rise, and he says the first thing that comes to mind.

“Too bad journalism is dying, I guess.”

Betty’s brow furrows, her mouth becomes a straight line, and she stares ahead at the road. _Fuck_ , he thinks.

Betty finally speaks. “Because an MFA in creative writing is so practical, I suppose?”

Jughead rolls his eyes. “Hey—at least my degree is funded.”

Betty scoffs. “Excuse me?”

“I’m just saying, you don’t know how I’m funding my degree.”

Betty’s head whips back and forth between him and the road.

“You don’t know how _I’m_ funding _my_ degree.” 

“Well,” Jughead says, gesturing with his hand around him.

“‘Well’? What does ‘well’ mean? What is that, what does _this_ ”—she juts her hand out from her body in imitation of him—“mean?”

“I’m just saying, Columbia Journalism School is a… _good_ school.”

“And?”

“And…this is a nice car?”

“Oh!” Betty exclaims, nodding. “Okay, I get it. You see this car and hear Columbia and suddenly I’m just little Miss Privilege, huh? Because you know all about me, is that it? In the—” she glances down at the clock on the dashboard—“forty-six minutes we’ve been acquainted, I guess?”

“Well, I—”

“No, no, it’s fine—sit in your judgment, by all means, please.”

After that, well—it’s easier to put his head back and pretend to doze.

They stop to eat somewhere in Pennsylvania, in the middle of the night. 

There’s a diner Betty has scouted and already marked on the map, so she doesn’t question him when he pulls off the highway and into the parking lot. It’s been hours, and they’ve only spoken to confirm the transfer of driving responsibilities. (“I’ll pull off up here.” “That’s fine.”)

“I’ll have two burgers, please, with everything on them, and a coke. And coffee.”

The waitress ( _I’m Deb_ , per her name tag) nods, doesn’t even write anything down on her pad before she turns to Betty. 

Betty leans back from poring over the laminate of the menu, her finger tapping an entry under the _Breakfast_ heading.

She smiles up at the waitress, whose expression remains stony in the face of Betty’s bright round face. Betty’s eyes are green, he notices.

“I’ll have an egg white omelet, please, but can you ask them to make it with one yolk?”

The waitress narrows her eyes, and Jughead leans back against the pleather of the booth. It squeaks. 

“One yolk?” she asks, and Betty nods. “I think it’s from a mix.”

“Oh,” Betty cocks her head, “in that case I’ll just have the Western omelet, but can you hold the onions, please?”

“Sure—” 

“And can I swap the Monterey Jack for sharp cheddar?”

 _I’m Deb_ nods. “Toast?”

“Do you have multigrain?”

“No, wheat, white, and rye.”

“Wheat, please. And a glass of water. Do you have tea?”

“Black and green.”

“Black tea—unless it’s Lipton, then I’ll just skip it.” 

The waitress clicks her pen, and the sound reminds Jughead of a switchblade. “Anything else,” Deb asks. It is not a question. Her head swings back and forth between him and Betty. Jughead shakes his head quickly.

“No, thank you!” Betty chimes in with another smile, this time with teeth.

“Where are you from?”

Betty’s knife saws through her omelet with purpose.

Jughead swallows half of his first burger in one bite, with a swig of fountain cola to rinse it down.

“Ohio,” he answers.

Betty’s fork, eggy with a bit of green pepper hanging from it like a pendulum, stops short of her mouth. “Really? We were just in Ohio.”

Jughead nods, takes another bit of his burger and catches mustard with his fingers before it drops onto his shirt. Betty’s eyes clearly catch it too, but she doesn’t mention it. 

“You didn’t say anything?”

Jughead nods again. His mouth is full, so he doesn’t point out that they hadn’t really said much of anything else either.

“How come?”

He swallows, and doesn’t think he can reasonably stuff another bite of burger into his mouth to avoid the topic, but he might as well try to redirect it.

“I don’t like it much. What about you, where you from?”

Thankfully, Betty takes the bait. She pushes egg around her plate and swallows a delicate sip of water (the waitress had not brought tea). 

“I’m from Connecticut.”

“Oh, right, yeah, I knew that,” he says with a nod. “Cool.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Hm?”

“‘ _Oh_ ’—”

Jughead sees where this is going, so he heads for the kibosh as quickly as possible.

“My girlfriend’s friend’s friend is from Connecticut, that’s how I found out you were driving to New York.”

“Oh—right. How’d you know Dilton? We went to high school together.”

Jughead chews his burger slowly this time, as though he might be able to draw this thread out through the whole meal. This seems like a safe topic.

“I don’t—my girlfriend knows a girl who’s dating Dilton’s friend Ben—or was, I don't know all the details.”

Jughead tries to never get lost in the gossipy web of who is dating who. He only has a finite number of brain cells, he’s not interested in frying them on trivialities. 

Betty crosses her arms under her chest. Jughead’s gaze drops down to the V of her sweater before quickly shooting back up to her face. He hates himself a little, hopes she didn’t notice. When she speaks it’s not to call him a perv, so maybe she hadn’t.

“So you don’t know Dilton? He told me he met you. He said you weren’t just some random stranger.” As though to herself, she continues. “Have I let a total rando into my car?”

Jughead scrambles. “No, we’ve met.”

“Where?”

“We…played a campaign together.”

Betty’s brow furrows. It’s actually a little cute, he thinks, but the thought moves through and out of his brain rapidly. “A campaign?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“Like, a political campaign, or some like…Napoleon, Waterloo shit?”

Jughead gulps down his coke.

“G and G.”

“G and G?”

He nods.

“What’s G and G?”

“Gryphons and Gargoyles.”

“Ohhh!” Betty exclaims. “You know Dilton from that board game club!”

“I’m not a member.”

“Hmm?” Betty takes a bite of her abandoned omelet, seemingly satisfied that his involvement in a table-top RPG means he’s not a serial killer.

“I’m not a part of that club, I just—happened to be in the common room when they were starting a campaign, they asked me to join.” He wonders as the words leave his mouth if he’s shooting himself in the foot. 

“Just the once?” 

Jughead’s feet shuffle below the table.

“No, I joined in again. Once or twice.”

“What’s your role? You have roles in that game, right?”

“Hellcaster.”

Betty’s brow raises again and he might call the look in her eyes knowing, if _I’m Deb_ hadn’t that moment saved him with the check.

Jughead cedes calculating the tip to Betty. 

As she speaks softly under her breath, his eyes roam around the room, fairly busy for the middle of the night somewhere west of Pittsburgh. 

He notices the old, boxy tv mounted in an out of the way corner. It’s muted—at least, he can’t hear it from where he’s sitting—and per the colophon in the bottom right of the screen, turned to what looks like the local PBS affiliate, in the middle of a late night screening of _The Philadelphia Story_.

Through the fuzz of the transmission, Katharine Hepburn swan dives into a swimming pool. He watches as she swims to the edge, as she admires the model boat her fiancé hands to her.

 _My, she was yar_ , Jughead thinks, and then he realizes Betty is speaking to him.

“—thirty-seven, so I rounded up. I’ll Venmo you—oh,” she follows his gaze over her shoulder, to the screen in the corner. “Oh,” she croons quietly, “I love this movie.”

Jughead pockets this information but says nothing.

They watch silently for a few minutes as he finishes his coffee.

“I hate the ending though,” Betty volunteers unprompted.

“Why?”

“It doesn’t make sense—she remarries C.K. Dexter Haven? She should have picked Mike.”

Jughead shakes his head. “No, that would never’ve worked.”

Betty looks at him like he has sprouted a unibrow, before turning back to the screen. “Mike is the only one who even sees her; everyone else is always telling her she…that she is this person she doesn’t want to be. All her chemistry is with Mike.”

“Maybe she _is_ that person.”

“‘Made of bronze?’” Betty shakes her head. “Cary Grant is better than Kitteridge, at least, but she still shouldn’t have picked him.”

“‘They grew up together,’” he quotes, and Betty rolls her eyes. “It’s realistic.”

“I grew up with Dilton, that doesn’t mean I’m about to marry him. Twice.”

Jughead moves to stand, and Betty follows.

“Like sticks with like,” he says. “It wouldn’t have lasted with Mike, they come from too different places.”

Betty holds the door for him to pass through. He hands her the car keys.

“But—but Mike’s the only one who doesn’t _put_ her on a pedestal or like, try to knock her off of one at the same time.” Betty speaks over the roof of the car as he stands at the passenger door, waiting for her to unlock it. As he slides into his seat, she continues.

“I’m not saying Hepburn and Cary Grant don’t have chemistry, I just don’t like how it ends.”

Jughead buckles his seat belt with a click, and merely shrugs. 

“So who do you know in New York?”

Jughead is shaken out of his daydreams. _Does it count as a daydream if it happens at night?_ , he wonders. Watching the lights pass rhythmically on the interstate is mesmerizing.

“Jughead?”

 _Oh_ , he thinks.

Betty keeps her eyes ahead, hands at ten and two. “I asked who you know in New York,” she repeats. “You mentioned your girlfriend earlier, is she there?”

“No, she’s in Chicago.”

Out of the corner of his eye he sees Betty nod, but then the light recedes again.

“But you already have a place to live?”

Betty Cooper might be a born journalist, he thinks, for all the questions she asks.

“Craigslist.”

“Oh,” is Betty’s only response, and he assumes that’s the end of this round of questioning, but then—“So you’re doing the long-distance thing?”

 _What is sleep_ , he muses. He feels a little guilty for the thought; after all, driving all night is mind-numbing, even if they are switching off shifts. Maybe she’s just bored.

The radio is soft, and partly static-y. Jughead assumes they’re crossing signals, from one territory into the next.

 _The distance thing_ , he thinks. 

“Uh, I guess so,” he says. “Haven’t really plotted it out.”

“Do you mean…you haven’t discussed it?”

He shrugs, but realizes Betty isn’t looking at him and likely she can’t even see him in the dark if she were.

“Not really,” he adds.

“Hm,” Betty nods, illuminated once more by the rapidly passing lights. “Does—what’s your girlfriend’s name?”

“Joani.”

“Joani, does she want to live in New York?”

“Yeah, she does. Eventually, I think.” Jughead turns to look at Betty’s profile. He can make out the gentle ski-slope point of her nose, the brightness of her eyes reflecting the dashboard lights. He doesn’t know why he says it, or why he is so honest with this stranger he’s spent the better part of a day with, but Betty is surprisingly easy to talk to. Maybe she’s on the right career path after all.

“I mean,” he hears himself saying, “who knows. Who can predict how things go.”

Even in this minimal light, he can’t miss the downturn at the corners of her mouth.

“Well, you could plan. Like—do you see yourself still together five years from now? Lots of people end up with their college boyfriend or girlfriend.”

He feels his eyebrows pull together. “Uhh,” he says, but she continues before he can verbalize a single thought.

“I mean, if you love each other, you can, like, make plans. Or work toward something, I don’t know, I just assume you’d want to be together, right?”

Jughead huffs a laugh. _This girl_ , he thinks. “This is a very interesting story you’re painting here,” he tells her.

“What do you mean?”

“Just that you’re writing some kind of… _love_ story out of thin air.” 

“It’s not a crazy ask. I assume you love your girlfriend.”

“Well. Whatever love is,” he adds quietly.

“So you haven’t…you haven’t talked about your future together? Do you want to get married?”

Were he not in a car seat, he thinks he might rear back physically at this. “I dunno, we’re _twenty-two_ , we’re not really talking about it. Also, marriage doesn’t necessarily equate here. Marriage isn’t,” he gets a bit hand-wavy here, “about _love_.” He rolls his eyes to himself. 

“So you don’t, like, _believe_ in love or something?”

“Well I wouldn’t go _that_ far. It’s just not something that lasts forever.”

“But what if it does?”

“It doesn’t.”

“My grandparents were married for forty-seven years.”

Jughead shrugs. “I’m sure a lot of people were, doesn’t mean they wanted to be.”

“But if they didn’t they _could_ have gotten divorced. It wasn’t unheard of.”

“Sure, but it was probably a bitch to get. There had to be evidence of cruelty or something, or you had to spend six weeks in Nevada to establish residency. That’s not exactly an easy or inexpensive thing to do.”

Betty frowns. “I guess. But that’s just so sad.”

Jughead shrugs again. “It just makes sense—my parents are divorced.”

“So are mine.” 

“And you _still_ think love is meant to last?”

“Sure.”

“That’s a little naive.”

“Well, that’s a lot cynical.”

“I’m realistic.”

Betty takes her eyes off the road to briefly look at him. “That’s just so sad. You’re volunteering to live a miserable life before it’s even started. That’s so sad.” She shakes her head, like she’s dismayed.

Something about her second _that’s so sad_ seems to flick some kind of switch in his chest. He’s reminded of elementary school, of the time he was suspended for playing with matches, how Archie had been there too, but hadn't even been scolded.

The matches were in his hands, the trash barrel next to the gym was ablaze because of a match he struck. 

He thinks of sitting outside of the principal’s office, his mother, already irate at having been pulled from her nursing shift, inside. He remembers the look the principal’s secretary had given him from her perch behind the desk, how she’d peered over her glasses at him, at his mother in her hospital scrubs with dark bags under her eyes.

Maybe his brain is just tired. He’s coming up on twenty-four hours awake. But Betty’s face and her pity remind him of his mother and the principal’s secretary and he’s just _done_. 

“You can pass all the judgement on me you want, it doesn’t mean I have to listen to it. Not all of us live fairytale lives of perfection.” 

“Excuse me?”

“I don’t know your life, and you don’t know mine, but it’s clear we come from very different places.”

Betty’s eyes flash, but they keep on the dark of the road before them, the oncoming traffic the only variation, sweeping over Betty’s face in a syncopated rhythm. 

“Listen, we just met,” she tells him, and something in her voice is different, almost steely. “I _don’t_ know your life. That’s fine, keep it to yourself, that’s your business. But don’t act like you know a single thing about my life because you see blonde hair and—a Volvo, and draw some pretty hasty conclusions about who you _think_ I am.”

Jughead can sense he’s crossed some sort of invisible boundary, something deep inside of him is aware and maybe even apologetic. But it’s so deep he cannot bring himself to care.

“Wake me for the next shift switch,” he says. He puts his earbuds in, pulls the brim of his hat down over his ears, and leans his head against the passenger window.

He comes to with a start, and above him he sees only blue sky and white arch.

He wipes the drool from the corner of his lip with his wrist, and realizes he’s been awakened by the slamming of a car door.

Betty, still in the driver’s seat with her hand resting on the door handle, turns to look at him.

“We’re here.”

She opens the trunk for him. He shoulders his duffle and she closes it again with a click.

He’s still waking up, so he feels a little disoriented. He gives his head a shake.

“What’s my half of the gas?”

“I sent you a Venmo request.”

A quick glance at his phone screen confirms this.

“Well,” he says, “thanks.”

Betty nods, and reaches out her hand— _this strange girl_ , he thinks as he shakes it. 

“No problem,” she says. “Good luck at City College.”

“Yeah, you too.”

And then she hops back into the car, and she is gone. 

  
  


_II._

_Five years later_

Betty stands alert, ready. 

Her eyes are glued to the little blue and white screen set into this pillar somewhere deep in the bowels of the lower concourse of Penn Station, and she’s _going_ to get a seat on this train. 

She’s guaranteed a seat, of course, since she’s purchased a ticket. But she’s determined to at least get a decent one. She’s taken the Amtrak north enough times to know to bypass the big departure board in the lobby completely in lieu of this junky subterranean screen, but it still feels like a secret. There’s maybe fifteen people down here with her, and she feels like she’s part of a club. They don’t fuck around. She doesn’t fuck around. She’s done this before. 

Ten minutes before her train is set to depart, the track number appears—and Betty thinks _fuck_ , because it’s a whole concourse over from where she stands. 

She and several of her compatriots begin to speed walk to the track, and when Betty finally huffs her rolling suitcase down the stairs, the platform is unfortunately already crowded.

She hustles to the door of the train furthest from the stairs and simply hopes. 

There’s a single seat vacant in the first five rows, after which the aisles are already crowded with passengers entering from the other end of the car. 

She hikes her suitcase up to her shoulder, slides it into the overhead compartment, and plops herself down into the seat. It’s the aisle, but it’ll suffice. 

It’s only when she takes a moment to breathe, to cool down after her speed walking and heaving her bag to and fro, that she takes in her surroundings, including her neighbor.

And she recognizes that hat instantly.

She averts her eyes forward quickly. He hasn’t looked up at her yet, perhaps he won’t remember her. She crosses her leg to the left, toward the aisle, her shoulder covering the lower half of her face in casual fashion, and buries her face in her phone. 

This is what she gets for splurging on the Acela instead of sticking with the Northeast Regional. And what’s it worth, really—twenty-five less minutes of travel time? 

It turns out, not even that.

They haven’t even made it to New Haven before the conductor comes over the loudspeaker, telling them there’s a dead Metro-North train ahead and they’ll be idling for a few minutes until the right of way is cleared.

Betty feels herself groan instinctually and she quickly clams up, hoping no one’s heard her, her neighbor especially.

He’s been silent the whole time, hasn’t stood to use the bathroom or visit the cafe car, his long nose deep in a library copy of _Barbarian Days_. 

But now he looks up, listening as the conductor completes his message, apologizing for the delay. 

“Doesn’t Amtrak have right of way?” He speaks softly, as though to no one in particular. 

Betty finds herself answering before she even realizes she’s speaking. “Connecticut owns the line until New Haven. Amtrak owns it between there and Massachusetts.”

He finally looks at her. 

“Huh. I didn’t know that.” 

She nods, and grimaces what she hopes is a noncommittal smile, and turns back to her notebook.

It doesn’t work.

“You don’t remember me do you?” he asks her. 

“Oh, no, I do, it’s very hard to forget a name like Jughead, I was just…giving you an out.”

“You were giving _me_ an out?”

“Mhm.” 

“Betty, right?

At this, Betty finally looks back up from her notebook to face him. She nods. “Yes. How are you?”

Jughead nods in return. “Good, you?”

“Great.” 

“You’re headed to Boston?” She nods. “Work or fun?”

“Work.” She’s silent for a beat, but then her Cooper instincts kick in, to her dismay. “And you?”

“Oh, my sister lives in Boston. She goes to Emerson.”

Betty nods politely, and hopes this is it. To put a button on things, she adds, “Isn’t this the quiet car?” Surely he can’t argue with the sacred tenets of the quiet car. 

“Nope, one car back.” 

_Damn_ , she thinks. 

Betty feels her phone begin to buzz underneath her thigh. It’s Reggie, and her heart aches a little.

The train has been idle for what feels like hours, but her phone tells her it has been less than twenty minutes.

She swipes the screen to answer in a whisper, “Hi Reggie!” cautious of being the loud person on their phone with a trapped audience.

“Hey, babe!” Reggie sounds cheerful, and she hears Jughead fail to stifle a snort. She crosses her legs and leans toward the aisle again.

“We’re stuck outside of New Haven, there’s a disabled train ahead of us.”

“Well, that’s bullshit. Do you want me to drive down and pick you up?”

“No, no, I mean, we’re not even at a station and by the time you got here I could be in Boston, don’t even think about it. Please.”

In another hour, they’re finally passing into Rhode Island. Jughead has been quiet, only politely saying _excuse me_ as he stood to pass her and step into the aisle.

He returns a few minutes later, but Betty is still surprised out of her workflow at the sound of him clearing his throat beside her, a paper cup of coffee in his hand.

“Oh! Oh, sorry.”

Jughead slides past her. “No worries,” he tells her, “ _babe_.”

Betty turns her head to look at him, and his grin could only be described as shit-eating and perfunctory.

She bites her tongue.

“So, did you finish journalism school?”

Betty’s head pops up from the crossword on her phone. Jughead looks at her aslant, like he’s more focused on his book than the fact that he just asked her a question.

She nods. “Yeah, I’m with the _Times_.” Three years in and she still gets a little frisson of pride up her spine when she tells people she works for the paper of record. 

“Mm,” is all he says.

Well. “What about you, have you published anything? Finish your…you were getting an MFA, right?”

Jughead turns the page of his book but finally actually looks at her. “Yep. Published my final project last year, actually.”

“Oh, really? Congrats, that’s great,” she tells him, and in this she’s sincere. She’s adjacent enough to publishing circles to know this isn’t an easy thing to do, that MFA programs don’t guarantee a publishing contract, that the market is already flooded with ambitious first novels and short story collections that go nowhere. 

“Thanks,” he tells her, looking back down at _Barbarian Days_. He clears his throat. “It’s a small press, it’s not that exciting.” 

Ah, Betty thinks. This Jughead is more familiar to her. He continues before she can respond.

“Break any good scoops? What’s your beat?”

“Metro desk, and…well, you have to develop a network, work your way up,” she says. “It takes a little time.”

“Right,” he nods.

Betty may be proud to be at the _Times_ , but it still chafes sometimes. She was hired in the same group out of Columbia, at the same time exact time Bret Weston Wallis was—but sometimes she worries Bret is racing past her. He got a solo byline months before she did. He seems to have ins in places she didn’t even know existed. 

Maybe it’s still a boy’s club, she sometimes wonders. But three out of the four editors she works most closely with are women. 

Whatever the answer might be, she doesn’t feel like hashing all of this out with Jughead Jones, of all people. She redirects. 

“So are you and that girl you were with at Northwestern still together?” He nods. Betty tries to suppress her smugness, curses her glass face. “Well, looks like love lasts after all.” She actually feels a little happy for him.

But Jughead snorts. “Okay.” He reaches for his book, tucked beside his seat.

Betty tells herself not to bite, not to be nosy, but her instincts kick in. 

“You live together. You’ve been together for like, five years minimum.”

Jughead’s book is splayed open across his knee, but he hasn’t looked down at it yet. “Well, New York is expensive. It’s practical.”

Betty narrows her eyes. “Wait. You…you’re…” She considers her phrasing carefully, not wanting to ask too personal a question. Ultimately, she aims for stating the obvious, instead of asking for clarification. 

“That’s _so_ cynical.” 

“That rent is expensive in New York? No, that’s a fact.”

“Okay, tell me this: how are you going to feel when—according to you—this relationship inevitably ends? Are you going to continue to live with this person who you are no longer in love with, in this one bedroom apartment—oh, I assume it’s a one-bed?” (Jughead nods.) “This one-bed. How are you gonna deal with that? _That_ sounds messy.”

Jughead sips from his coffee, delicately places it back upon the tray table, spinning it slowly.

He shrugs. “I dunno. It’s probably gonna suck. That’s why I pack light.”

Betty blinks. “You ‘pack light’? As in, you don’t…own stuff?”

He shrugs. “Not a ton. Stuff is expensive. You can’t take it with you.”

“Yeah, when you _die_ , but you can when you move.”

“But that’s it—moving sucks.”

“Yeah, exactly—is that…” Betty processes for a moment. “Is that a reason to stay with a person you don’t love? Real estate?”

Jughead appears to be thinking. “I’m sure it’s happened before. I’m sure people have stayed together for less.”

Betty leans back in her seat.

“That’s miserable,” she tells him, “that sounds absolutely miserable.” She shakes her head. “I—really?” Jughead shakes his own head, shrugging yet again. Over the loudspeaker, the conductor announces the next station is five minutes out.

Betty sits, dumbfounded.

“I feel bad for you, Jughead. No—I feel sad. You’re only twenty-seven—twenty-seven?—and you’ve just—you’re…” She trails off. “I literally don’t know what to say.”

Jughead cocks his head. “Well, babe, I think that’s probably a first.”

She doesn’t look back as she follows the crowd up the long platform at South Station, but she knows he’s behind her. 

It’s late, and the station is bright and mostly empty. She stands below the big departures board, where the floor is the widest, and watches the workers at Au Bon Pain close up shop.

“Your boyfriend here?”

She turns to see Jughead next to her, has to angle her head to look up at him. She realizes she hasn’t really stood next to Jughead very much, in the twenty-four plus hours of her life she’s spent with him total, they’re usually sitting down—in a car, at a diner, on a train. He’s taller than she’d realized. 

“Not yet.” She looks at her phone. Reggie’s most recent text is fifteen minutes old, telling her he’ll be there in less than thirty minutes. 

Jughead nods, but doesn’t move to leave. 

They stand silently, for the most part. Betty thinks to ask him where he’s staying (his sister lives in Downtown Crossing, he tells her), and Betty parses the mental whiplash she keeps experiencing in the face of Jughead Jones. He’s so cynical, and yet he’s keeping her company, late at night in a strange city. 

“You’re an odd duck, Jug,” she tells him. 

It feels weird to shorten his name; she wonders if he minds, but he doesn’t say anything about it.

Instead he responds, “I’ve heard worse.”

It makes her smile. And then she spots Reggie walking briskly up from the steps that lead down to the subway.

She’s hugging him tightly, telling him she’s glad to see him, and by the time she looks back to say goodbye to Jughead, he is gone.

  
  


_III._

_Five years later_

“Jess and I broke up.”

Archie pauses, a fry weighted with ketchup mere inches from his mouth. “Dude, no way.”

Jughead nods. Archie actually drops the fry, wiping his hands with a napkin and leaning back in his chair. 

“When’d it happen?”

“Yesterday. After work.” 

Archie crosses his arms and shakes his head. “That’s tough. How are you?”

This, Jughead thinks, is where he feels confused. He shakes his head. “I don’t get it?” Archie nods and raises his eyebrows, encouraging him to continue. “I feel…sad.”

“Yeah, man, it sucks.”

“No, no—I don’t understand _why_ I’m sad.”

Archie’s brow furrows. “Dude, you just got dumped.”

“Yeah but—things end. Everything ends, everybody dies.”

“Jeez, Jug.”

“It brings me comfort to remember that.”

“ _That_ brings you comfort, knowing you’re gonna die?”

“Yeah—this is it.”

“What is?”

“ _This_ ,” Jughead waves his arms wide, to this Shake Shack at large, crowded and busy on a November afternoon. “This is the show. There’s no dress rehearsal. ‘We’ll do it live,’” he adds, but Archie either misses the reference or ignores it.

“So, you’re sad that you’re sad?”

Jughead shrugs. “I guess.” He shakes his head. “No, I’m pissed—it’s stupid to be sad about it, and I feel like a hypocrite.”

“Jug, you’re only human. If you’re sad, you’re sad. It’s normal. It sucks to get dumped—it almost always sucks, no matter what.”

Jughead crosses his arms, shakes his head like he can’t quite figure something out. “But I know. I _knew_.”

“For how long? When did you figure it out?”

“Since the beginning.”

Archie looks exasperated. “No, when did you realize Jess and you weren’t working out?”

Jughead shuffles his feet. “When she said it wasn’t working out and she didn’t want to be together anymore.”

“Oof—Juggie.”

“What?”

“That’s bad, man.” Archie shakes his head. “You’re telling me this came out of nowhere? There were _no_ signs?”

“No.”

Archie shakes his head again. “No, man. There’s always signs, even if you only realize them afterwards.”

“I swear.”

Archie narrows his eyes, and Jughead feels odd to be so closely regarded by his oldest friend, ostensibly the person who knows him best. Better even than Jessica, who he’d been with for nearly three years.

Then he thinks, maybe that’s the problem.

Betty sucks her teeth. “Reggie proposed.” 

Veronica gasps and spins around, her eyes wide. Betty continues.

“We broke up.”

At this, Veronica puts down the bauble she’d been examining and rewraps her scarf around her neck. 

“Come on—we need to sit down for this,” she tells Betty as she begins to pull on her gloves.

Veronica swirls her martini—“Hendrick’s, very dry, twist”—slowly, before bringing it to her mouth with narrowed eyes.

“I thought you wanted to get married?” she asks, and Betty nods in agreement.

“I did—I do. But then he pulled out this Tiffany’s box and I thought ‘fuck.’ I can’t marry the person who pulls out a ring and I only think ‘fuck,’ can I?”

Veronica cants her head thoughtfully. “I suppose it depends on the fuck.”

“It was a bad fuck,” Betty confirms, and Veronica shakes her head solemnly.

“If it was a bad fuck, you can’t marry him.” 

Betty slumps her shoulders and reaches for her own cocktail (“A Bramble, please.”) “My mom’s gonna be pissed.”

“Are you going to tell her?”

“Not about the proposal, _god_ no. But I’ll have to tell her we broke up.”

“Explain this part to me,” Veronica waves her hand in encouragement, “I don’t understand how this degraded so quickly. People usually realize this before rings are bought,” she raises a staying hand, “except in certain, rare circumstances—no names, of course.”

Betty files this teasing tidbit away for later, and proceeds to tell Veronica about Reggie’s proposal. About how she’d returned from the kitchen with a glass of wine in hand, how the lights had been dimmed, how suddenly there were five (Betty counted them, blowing them out hours later) candles aflame on the coffee table, quickly gathered from around the room and set alight as she’d struggled to find the wine key in the kitchen, realizing now Reggie must have purposely misplaced it to buy himself some set up time.

She tells Veronica about how she’d frozen, about _fuck_. She elides some of what Reggie had said—it feels too personal to share so much of this, so intimate as it had been, so private the devastation that had fallen over Reggie’s face when he realized her tears were not of joy. 

“He transferred offices for me, to _be_ with me.”

Veronica scoffs. “No, he used you as a reason to transfer offices; I assure you, a guy like Reggie did not want to be stuck in Boston for the long-term.”

“So who brought up, you know—ending things?” Veronica asked.

Betty sighs. “Technically, he did.” Veronica grimaces and nods. 

Reggie had asked her _when_ , and Betty had not known. 

Reggie had asked her _why_ , and Betty could not tell him. 

Reggie had asked _what is the point_ , and Betty only shrugged.

  
  


_IV._

There are few things Betty enjoys more than she does browsing a bookstore with a friend. 

Even in December, with the aisles a little more crowded than normal and the streets full of salt and slush, there’s pleasure to be had in gossiping about both literature and life with a kindred spirit.

She turns her head to gush to Kevin about Sally Rooney as he simultaneously tells her about his latest hookup (a man improbably named Moose) and she sees a tufty gray hat. She’s hit with a wave of deja vu.

It’s just her luck that the hat’s owner looks up and catches her eye at that very moment.

Her head whips back to face Kevin.

“ _Fuck_ ,” she whispers.

“Ooh, what, did you see someone?” He gasps. “Oh no, is Reggie here?”

“No, no—there’s this guy I drove from Chicago to New York with after college, he’s over by the new biography table—no, _no_ , don’t look—jeez, Kevin.” She shakes her head. Kevin’s expression is coyly innocent. 

“Oh, he’s not bad. Seems like…” Kevin’s hand waves in front of his chest in an odd, indescribable dance. Betty shakes her head at him, confused. “Like, moody?”

She nods. “Moody is right.”

“He’s looking this way—”

“ _Don’t_ look at him, Kev—”

“Maybe he’s into you?” 

“Oh, he doesn’t like me. Five bucks says he pretends he doesn’t notice me—”

“Betty?”

Kevin snorts and Betty spins to face Jughead Jones.

“Jughead—wow,” she widens her smile, recalls that a true Duchenne smile reaches the eyes, and hopes it convinces. These are the moments being raised in the Cooper household has its benefits. “How are you?” 

Jughead nods, and even almost smiles. It’s semi-disconcerting. She tries to remember if he’d ever smiled when they’d interacted in the past. Surely yes, she decides. People _smile_.

Before he can respond to her question, she interjects. “This is my friend Kevin; Kevin this is—” but Kevin is gone. She scans the store and spots him. He waves at her, then slips out through the door and into the street.

“Well,” Betty sighs, “that was Kevin.”

Jughead raises his eyebrows and nods again, toward the now-empty space Kevin had occupied. 

“He doesn’t look like ‘babe,’” he says.

“Oh! No—Kevin’s not my boyfriend. We know each other from work.”

Jughead nods once more, and Betty notices how this thumb runs up and down the spine of the book he carries.

“Surprised you didn’t end up moving to Boston,” he tells her.

“Well—Reggie actually moved to New York a few years ago, so.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah. But hey, your sister—is she still in Boston? She’s probably graduated by now, right?”

“She has,” and Betty thinks she detects a small hint of pride in his tone. “She’s actually moving to LA in a few weeks.”

“Oh, wow.”

“Yep. Not as easy to get to, maybe that’s why she chose it.”

Betty cants her head. “I’m sure that’s not true.”

Jughead shrugs. “But hey—so you and Mr. Consultant are still together, that’s great.”

Betty feels her eyebrows rise of their own volition. “Well…”

“Oh, shit. Sorry.”

“No, it’s fine. We actually just…” she bobs her head back and forth, as if searching for the words “It ended,” she finishes lamely.

“Right.”

“It happens.”

“Right.”

Betty purses her lips and nods. “But what about you? Still with—”

But Jughead shakes his head. “Nope. A couple years.”

Betty shrugs, makes a small noise of condolence that she hopes isn’t rude.

“I actually—” Jughead begins at the same time she opens her mouth to say “Well—” They both stop, wait for the other to continue. 

“What?” she asks, after he’s been silent for a lengthy moment. 

“I actually just got dumped.”

“Oh shit. I’m sorry, Jughead. That’s hard.”

He cocks his head and looks at her thoughtfully.

“It is,” he finally tells her.

And so Jughead finds himself having coffee with Betty Cooper.

He’s more honest with her than he is typically with people he’s just met. But he rationalizes, he _hasn’t_ just met Betty. Technically he’s known her—sort of—for ten years.

He thinks he likely would not still be talking to Betty Cooper ninety minutes after he’d first run into her at McNally Jackson, had his sister not so recently broken the news to him, rather excitedly, of her upcoming move to California.

His sister’s gainful employment should not make him dismay, and he feels guilty for even a moment conveying anything but enthusiasm to JB—but she’d seen right through him.

“I don’t want you to be all alone, Jug,” she’d said, and he’d scoffed. “Jug,” she repeated, a little more sternly, and then he was silent.

First Jess, and now JB.

There’s only so much isolation even he can stomach. He doesn’t want to become one of those New York stories—the old man who died alone, only to be discovered once the smell started to seep into the hallway of his apartment building.

When he’d looked up from the book he’d been leafing through to the sound of a familiar voice, and seen a recognizable head of blonde hair—well, who can blame him for acting a little out of character?

When her eyes are burning from staring at her work screen for too long, she gets a text from Jughead.

 _Jones, Jughead_ : near wtc wanna get coffee?

 _Betty Cooper_ : god yeah, I’ve completely faded

 _Jones, Jughead_ : 2 pm caffeine infusion

They meet at a coffee cart on the plaza. The coffee’s no good, but they spend twenty minutes chatting about the movie Jughead’s just come from (“In the middle of a work day?” “My hours are my own, Betty.”) Betty tells him how Bret had spoken over her in a pitch meeting, and how much she wanted to push his face into a sink full of water (“That’s very specific.”)

When it’s time to leave and prepare for her three pm editorial meeting, she sighs. “Well, into the breach, I guess.”

Jughead cocks his head. “Oh please, I’ve read your stuff, you could run circles around these fools.”

“What’re you doing?”

“I’m working on a puzzle.”

“A jigsaw puzzle?”

“Yes, why?”

“Oh, no reason, _Nana_.” 

Betty scoffs down the line. “Well, what are _you_ doing on Saturday night?”

Jughead crunches into the phone. “I’m watching _Casablanca_.”

Betty gasps softly. “I love _Casablanca_ —is it on TV right now?”

“Streaming.”

“Oh.”

“It’s on Netflix, I can give you my password?”

“No, no—it’s more fun to watch it with someone.”

They’re silent for a beat.

“Do you want me to restart it so you can watch at the same time?”

Betty’s silent, and then—“What part are you at?”

“‘Your winnings, sir.’”

“Okay, pause, I’ll scrub to that part.” 

“Mhm.” 

“What’s your puzzle of?”

“What?”

“What’s your jigsaw puzzle? What’s the picture?”

“Oh, it’s old movie posters.” 

“Well that’s fitting.”

“I guess so. I love this part. Ingrid Bergman was so beautiful.” 

“She really was.” 

“I mean—maybe it’s unconventional, but Bogart could probably get it, too.”

“Lauren Bacall clearly thought so.” 

“Mm. Did you know Lauren Bacall’s real name was Betty, too?”

“No shit?”

“Yeah. Betty Joan Perske.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah.”

“Bogie loved Betty, I guess.” 

“So then she was just like—‘I’m gay, by the way, talk to you later, bye,’ _all_ at once,” he says. He shakes his head. “I’m not surprised or anything, I just—” He’s silent for a minute. He just wants to make sure JB knows this doesn’t change things. He loves her. He’s happy she’s happy and that she knows what she wants. He tells Betty all of this after a screening of _His Girl Friday_ at Lincoln Center. 

Betty nods in understanding. “Have you told her that?”

“What?”

“That you love her and that you appreciate her telling you and that you’re proud of her?”

“No.”

Betty shrugs. “Maybe start there, pal.”

“Really? It’s that simple?”

Betty bobs her head back and forth. “No, I don’t think so, not really. But it’s a start, right? It sort of sounds like she was afraid of how you’d react.”

This comes as a shock to Jughead. “Wh—really? Why would she think that? She’s Jellybean, she’s my sister.” To him, all of this is deeply obvious. 

“Well, again, you have to _tell her_ that—you can’t just assume she knows.” Betty shrugs. “You live on opposite sides of the country now, your love languages have to adjust to accommodate.”

Jughead narrows his eyes. Betty smiles a Cheshire grin, but he does not argue. 

“My mother asked me if I’d considered freezing my eggs.”

Jughead nearly does a true spit take at this announcement.

“Jesus,” he says. Betty’s mother sounds, and this is not a word he throws around lightly, like a psychopath. 

Betty widens her eyes. “It’s not like she doesn’t already have two grandchildren, I don’t know what to tell her. Actually, I’ve been avoiding her calls.”

Jughead leans over the table toward her, and gently places his hand over hers where it rests next to her place setting.

“Betty, I mean this from the deepest, darkest, truest part of my heart—please don’t listen to your mother.”

His facial expression seems to break something in Betty’s composure, because she laughs, and it feels like relief.

(Alice Cooper is definitely crazy though, he maintains.) 

  
  


_V._

“You know, you’d probably like my friend Archie, now that I think about it. I can see it, you two together.”

Betty does that cute little brow thing she does when she thinks he’s being intentionally obtuse.

“Jug, men are dead to me, I already told you this—Kevin and present company excluded.”

Jughead shakes his head. “No, no, I swear—something about it seems right to me. He’s your type but like, the elevated version of your type.”

Betty scoffs at him, but it’s undercut when she simultaneously tosses him a fortune cookie. He fumbles it, but at least it lands on the table.

“I’m sincerely afraid to know what you think my type is.”

“Oh, Betty”—she narrows her eyes again—“you _love_ an all-American himbo.”

Betty rears back and nearly shrieks. “Give me that!” She tries to pluck the fortune cookie back but he holds it far past her reach and pops the plastic open.

“Hey—you like a well-built gent, there’s nothing to be ashamed of!” Betty’s cheeks redden, and it only serves to goad him further. “And Archie’s my oldest friend—”

“He’s your only friend,” Betty grumbles.

“—and he’s one of my top three people in this world, and you _know_ I don’t say that lightly.”

“Mmm,” Betty grunts doubtfully through a mouthful of lo mein. “Yeah, who’re the other two, Céline Sciamma and Bong Joon-Ho?”

He raises his eyebrows. “Jellybean Jones”—Betty shrugs begrudgingly—“and Betty Cooper.”

Another forkful of lo mein hovers before her mouth and she shoots daggers at him with her eyes.

“Oh, you’re sneaky.”

Jughead shrugs widely. “I’m a man of particular tastes.”

“Ha! I’ll say. You’re a snob.” Betty’s eyes gleam, but then her attitude transforms. “If you set me up, I get to set you up.”

This Jughead does not expect, and Betty seems to read this on his face. She shrugs with delight. 

“Square’s square, Juggie.” 

Jughead swallows his bite of crab rangoon. He has a bad feeling about this. But he usually has a bad feeling about things. He’s begun to wonder if he’ll be left behind. He thinks about how, when Archie found himself in a new relationship he seemed to drop off the grid. Jughead sometimes felt like he was down a friend, at least until Archie’s romance eventually wound down, as they all seemed to eventually do. 

But the wind down isn’t inevitable, he reminds himself. Archie’s a good guy. Betty is wonderful. He doesn’t begrudge them their happiness. He’s just never trusted the Jones family luck to give him that kind of happiness. 

Maybe if Archie and Betty hit if off, he won’t lose either of them. Maybe he’ll be their third wheel—the one they don’t shun because he’s the one who set them up. He wasn’t lying—they truly were, of people he didn’t share parents with, his two favorite people. Maybe they’d adopt him. The thought makes him internally chuckle.

Or what if it all blows backfires and he ends up all alone.

“Who’re you thinking of?” he finally asks.

“My friend Veronica.”

“Why her?”

“You’re both total snobs.”

“ _Thanks_.”

“No, no—I mean, you _are_ , but I like you both very much.”

“Sure.” He’s sarcastic, but Betty continues with sincerity. 

“I think you’d have a lot to talk about: you’re both well-read, very particular about cinema, I think you both have…exacting standards that might complement one another.”

They meet at an Italian place in the West Village. 

Betty and Veronica arrive first via car, and Jughead shows up on foot not long after, a man with wide shoulders and bright red hair at his side.

He _is_ cute at least, she thinks. It still makes her smart that Jug labeled her type as _himbo_. She appreciates someone who takes care of themself—that’s nothing to be ashamed of. Among her greatest accomplishments of the past year is getting Jughead to stop living _entirely_ on Postmates and to jog around the block every once in a while. She’s a little less worried he's going to meet a premature death from caffeine overdose from all the black coffee he drinks at all hours of the day.

Betty turns to Veronica, who appraises their approaching compatriots through narrowed eyes.

“Well,” Veronica says under her breath, “he’s not so unattractive.”

Betty nods. “I told him to leave his hat at home.”

Veronica tilts her head, her eyes on Jughead’s friend. “Look at those freckles though, those are adorable. Wonder what’s under that sweater. Betty, you lucky little girl.” Veronica winks, and Betty’s cheeks feel warm.

Maybe this will go well after all.

It does not go well.

Jughead and Veronica seem unable to find a mutual topic of agreement. He’s spent at least ten minutes trying to explain to her that _Joker_ was terrible, that Martin Scorsese made that film forty years ago and it was called _The King of Comedy_. 

“Listen,” she’d replied, “I love a young De Niro, what’s not to love—but Joaquin turned in a _performance_.”

Jughead shakes his head. “He’s— _fine_ , but the film is a mess—”

Jughead tries to keep one ear open to the other half of the table. It sounds like Betty and Archie are discussing strength training. He cannot tell if this is a good thing. He hopes they’re faring better than he and Veronica, with whom—from their admittedly short acquaintance—he appears to hold no common opinions on a number of topics beyond just how derivative or not Todd Phillips is. 

They have tried numerous: Stones versus Beatles, East Coast versus West Coast hip hop, Katherine versus Audrey. They cannot find consensus. The debate, Jughead can admit, is lively—but he also feels exhausted, wishing he could call a timeout in order to regroup. 

He realizes belatedly that silence has befallen the table, and when he meets Betty’s eyes she widens them imploringly.

“So—” he begins, with no idea where he is going. Betty jumps in.

“V, Jug minored in Film Studies.”

Veronica daintily sips her cocktail. “Oh, I’d gathered.”

“Betts is training for a half-marathon,” Jughead tries.

Archie nods. “Yeah, we were talking some cross-training options, she’s gonna swing by the gym sometime next week.”

“Oh, that sounds cool,” Jughead says, and Betty looks at Archie and nods. Jughead is reminded, oddly, of Archie and JB discussing field hockey years ago, back when they’d been in high school and Jellybean had been thinking of joining the middle school team. Archie had encouraged her, suggesting conditioning drills she might try prior to tryouts.

 _Oh_ , Jughead realizes.

They walk up the avenue four abreast. 

The streets are pretty empty right now, so Betty can’t even summon guilt at hogging the sidewalk.

The night’s been a bust. Archie's a gentleman, but the spark is absent. Also, Veronica looks irritated. This has backfired.

“Well, I’ve called a Lyft—B, will you get home safely?” Veronica asks. Betty nods, but before she can speak, Archie does.

“Yeah, I gotta catch the 1 uptown, Juggie.” He holds his hand out to Betty and Veronica in turn to shake. “It was great meeting you both.”

“Where are you headed?” Veronica asks him.

“Washington Heights.”

“We can share a car, if you’d like? I’m at seventy-ninth.”

“Oh—if you don’t mind, yeah, that’d be great,” Archie nods. “I’ll chip in half.”

Veronica waves to the driver of a shiny black town car that’s pulled up to idle beside them, and she leans in to peck Betty on the cheek.

“Don’t worry about it,” she tells Archie, and smiles at him when he opens the car door for her. “Night, B.” She throws Jughead a cursory look. “Pleasure,” she says, and slides neatly into the car, Archie joining her with a jovial wave back at them.

Jughead turns to Betty with dull eyes.

“Shit show, right?”

Betty lets out a huff of breath.

“I’ve had better root canals. Archie’s sweet, but I was more worried you were going to go at Veronica with the butter knife.”

“ _Me_?”

“Yes, you!”

“She’s the one who said I had, quote, provincial taste!”

Betty shrugs. “Well, I don’t know! I thought maybe it could be like an opposites attract thing.” Her defensive expression falls from her face. “Unlike you, who set me up with my goddamn _brother_.” 

“You have a lot in common!”

“Yeah, maybe because we were separated at birth. We literally _both_ grew up on an Elm Street, Jug. You can’t make that shit up.”

Jughead shrugs “Okay. Okay, so maybe we just don’t set each other up anymore?”

“Yeah, I’ll say.”

“At least the food was good?”

“My salmon was undercooked.”

“Why didn’t you send it back?”

“I didn’t want to be rude.”

“So you ate unintentional sushi?”

“No, I didn’t finish it.”

Jughead stops. “Are you hungry?”

Betty pauses, before nodding. “Yes.”

“C’mon, let’s get something to eat.”

Betty does not question his appetite, merely concedes and nods when he suggests a diner five blocks west. 

_Lodge, Veronica_ : Beautiful, a favor?

 _Betty Cooper_ : sure what’s up

 _Lodge, Veronica_ : Do you mind if I ask Archie to have a drink? I know you have gym plans

 _Betty Cooper_ : yeah of course, go for it! we’re def platonic

 _Lodge, Veronica_ : 100% no feels?

 _Betty Cooper_ : one hundo

 _Lodge, Veronica_ : okay good, we fucked

 _Betty Cooper_ : !!!

 _Betty Cooper_ : V!!!

 _Lodge, Veronica_ : listen, I was almost positive you weren’t barking up that tree otherwise I wouldn’t have

 _Betty Cooper_ : no no I know but HOW. WHEN?

 _Lodge, Veronica_ : I shall kiss and tell u later, much to share

 _Betty Cooper_ : !!! 

“Are you kidding me?”

Archie puts his strength into slamming repeatedly down on the joystick of his game controller, leaning forward as though proximity to the screen might help him.

Jughead slaughters his orc summarily and Archie deflates, if only for a moment.

He nods. “We got to talking. She’s really cool. I think I like her.”

“You _think_?” Archie nods. “Does Betty know?”

Archie nods again. “Yeah, we met up yesterday. Dude, do you know how much she can bench?”

Jughead does not.

  
  


_VI._

Veronica’s annual New Year’s party is a glossy affair, and as far as Betty is concerned, it’s likely very much _not_ Jughead’s scene. 

But Veronica’s still dating Archie, and Jughead is _her_ friend now, so somehow she’s convinced him to attend. 

She wears a spangly dress in midnight blue and has two glasses of fizzy champagne cocktail before it’s even 11:30. 

She manages to pull him out on the dancefloor for a few of the jazzier tunes the DJ spins, and she even makes him laugh while he’s out there, with her insistence that he hold out his arm to let her twirl, pushing him to catch her as she dips. 

They lose track of time, and when the countdown begins they’re the only odd people out on the roof of Veronica’s building, surrounded by couples who’ve fled the heat of the crowded rooms inside and are hoping to catch some fireworks, actual or metaphorical.

She looks at him and he looks at her. He rolls his eyes and she thinks he’s sweet to indulge her. 

In her heels, she doesn’t even have to stand on tip-toes to peck his lips. He hugs her and whispers “Happy New Year” into her ear, and she’s startled back from him by the bang of a firecracker down on the street.

“I’m gonna walk over the bridge, I think.”

“ _What_? Are you mad? It’s like ten degrees out here. No.”

“Yeah.”

“No, you’re coming with me, we’ll share a Lyft.”

“No, come on, I don’t want to pay that for that. Can you imagine the surge pricing right now?”

“Fine then, come to my place, it’s closer.”

“Please.”

“No, you’re coming, that’s it. I’ve already ordered it.”

Betty tells him he’s hilarious for thinking he’s going to fit on her couch. “We’ll share, you idiot.”

“Babe, you’ve basically already kidnapped me to your apartment, I’m not going to crowd your bed.”

She shakes her head, but she only feels fondness. Must be the champagne still in her system. 

There’s something about brushing your teeth with someone, Betty thinks. That’s real intimacy. 

Betty’s bed is pretty damn comfortable, surely better than the couch, he thinks. He’s kind of glad he didn’t stand his ground.

They chat quietly. They discuss the party, they talk about Veronica and Archie. Jughead tells Betty he wanted to buy tickets for a screening of _The Apartment_ that happens annually. He keeps meaning to do it, year after year, but always forgets.

Eventually the conversation ebbs. He nuzzles his head further into Betty’s pillows ( _damn, these are soft_ ) and waits for sleep to take him. 

“Hey Jug?” Betty’s voice is hardly above a whisper, and he thinks he can feel her breathe fan over the pillows toward his face. It smells like her minty toothpaste, in the fancy green tube, the one he teases her about (but not so much that he himself didn’t partake in utilizing it when they took turns in the bathroom). 

He grunts softly in response, keeping his eyes closed and burrowing his head more comfortably into his pillow.

“Do you wanna fool around a little?”

His eyes snap open. 

Betty’s teeth bite into her lower lip, and her eyes flash teasingly. Betty isn’t an ironic person, he thinks.

“ _Jesus_ , Betts,” he says, and she laughs softly. He snakes his hand out from under the duvet and pushes haphazardly, without much conviction, at her jaw, but she shakes him off and her smile only widens.

He shakes his head into the pillow and Betty resettles next to him. “You’re…” he begins, and Betty’s eyes slide to meet his gaze again, “something else, Betty.”

“Something good?”

“Pathological,” he responds, and she laughs again.

“You ever think about it though? Ever?”

The question sounds sincere, and Jughead marvels that Betty can be so earnest and even sexy in a moment like this. She is, he realizes, among his closest of friends. It’s a testament to Betty’s very self that she has eroded his every defense, slowly and surely; that she remains his friend, endures even in the face of all his many faults. 

“Who’s the last person you slept with?” she asks, and Jughead doesn’t even feel defensive in the face of her questioning.

“Cricket,” he tells her. “And you?”

“Reggie.”

“Really? Not what’s his face from Michigan?”

Betty makes a small noise of derision, shakes her head, rustling her pillow case. “Please. Definitely not.”

“Hm. Fair.”

Betty narrows her eyes. “You didn’t answer the question.”

“Which question?”

“Have you ever thought about it? You and me?” Her tone is wry.

“Betty, I am human, and you are you. You know you’re gorgeous.”

A soft pink flushes across the tops of her cheeks, hard to discern through the dimness of the room, and a pleased expression crosses her face.

“When we met, sure,” Jughead continues.

“Really?” Betty seems surprised. “On the drive from Evanston?” Jughead nods. “I thought you hated me.”

“Well,” he says, and Betty rolls her eyes. “If anything you scared me. But again, it’s unbecoming to feign ignorance, _babe_.”

Betty scoffs quietly.

“You’re sweet, Juggie.” She smiles at him. “Thank you.”

He nods at her, and she shuffles a fraction of an inch closer.

Jughead thinks about earlier in the evening, about the countdown to midnight, how they’d stood together as everyone around them had begun to chorus Auld Lang Syne, as seemingly everyone appeared to have a partner to kiss when the clock struck twelve.

He thinks about how Betty had looked up at him and rolled her eyes, how her cheeks had been flushed then too, with champagne and dancing. Their eyes had met, and they’d conversed silently, without words: _Shall we? Might as well? Okay_. 

Jughead thinks about that brief kiss, about the softness of Betty’s lips, and then he crosses the inches between them in her bed and puts his lips to hers once more.

At first it’s just a kiss.

But soon there are _hands_ , and then Jughead’s mouthing his way across Betty’s jawline.

“We should—we should lay some ground rules.” Her voice is breathy, and he pulls himself back from what feels like his id’s running of the show. He keeps his lips to her throat when he speaks.

“Rules,” he says. “Yeah, rules are good.”

Betty’s nails are scratching at the back of his scalp, and the thought this prompts in him ( _please, never stop doing that_ ) brings him back to his senses.

“Rules,” he repeats.

“Rules,” Betty echoes. “Just tonight?”

Jughead considers. He thinks about his friendship with Betty, about her place in his life. He will do almost anything to preserve that friendship, to keep Betty happy and healthy and solvent. He’d do anything, he realizes.

 _Rules_ , he thinks. 

“I think that’s probably a good idea, to set some kind of boundary on…this,” he finishes lamely.

“Okay,” Betty nods. “Okay, cool.”

They look at each other for a moment, and then Betty smiles. He leans in to kiss that smile with his own.

It’s almost…methodical, Jughead thinks.

It isn’t rushed or frantic. It’s curious, and generous—it’s like Betty, he realizes. 

Betty’s hand slides slowly down his torso, like she doesn’t want to startle him. Her mouth trails after it apace, content only to explore. Her hands push at his shirt, and so he takes it off; her hands grasp at his hands, and so he lets her place them in her hair. She looks up at him, and her eyes ask _okay?_ and so he nods, and she takes him into her mouth.

There are three people in his life that he considers know him best. He is related to one, he might as well be related to another for how long they’ve known one another, and the third is Betty.

It tracks, Jughead supposes, that sex with a person who knows him as well as Betty does has a higher likelihood of being _good_ sex.

And it is.

Jughead hasn’t had sex with many people, but he knows it’s always weird the first time. It’s weird this time, too—but it’s a different kind of weird.

It’s not awkward with Betty. When he accidentally pulls her hair in a way she does not appreciate, she tells him. When he accidentally pulls her hair in a fashion that makes her moan, she tells him to do it again. He listens.

He likes the noises she makes, and how her leg spasms when she comes.

Sex is _fraught_ , in Jughead’s experience. But sex with Betty is fun. When he summons the courage to ask of her, she responds with enthusiasm, with confidence. 

_This is Betty_ , he thinks, watching her move above him, _Betty in essence_ —confident, thoughtful, kind. 

He wakes to the smell of coffee percolating, and then cinnamon.

When he shuffles into Betty’s kitchen she’s at the stove, a short stack of French toast plated beside her.

When she hands him a plate, she keeps her grip firm upon it and he meets her eye.

“You good?” she asks.

He nods. “I’m good.” She smiles.

“Good. The coffee’s Guatemalan this month, you like Guatemalan, right?”

“Fuck yeah, the superior bean,” he agrees, and then is is like the door has closed—they are safe.

 _The past is another country_ , he thinks. 

In May, over dinner, Veronica and Archie drop a bomb. 

They are moving in together. They’ve been together since October and now they are going to cohabitate. 

To Betty, this feels like both a shock and yet entirely expected. Since their ill-fated group date, Veronica and Archie have been attached at the hip, and not in the way V typically latches onto her paramour of the moment. 

Archie’s good for Veronica, Betty thinks. He’s extremely grounded, no-nonsense and yet somehow still indulgent toward what Betty has always perceived as Veronica’s rich person eccentricities. 

It’s fast, for sure—but Betty is happy for them, and tells them as much.

Jughead is suspicious. 

He doesn’t think this is wise in the slightest. Veronica is Betty’s closest friend, and Betty is now Jughead’s closest friend (this in itself feels like a harbinger of adulthood. Aren’t new friends supposed to be impossible to make once you hit thirty? This is what he’d always assumed, this is what everyone always says).

Betty’s got a sensible head on her shoulders. If she’s not bothered that Veronica and Archie have been together for less than a year and are now going to share a lease, well then, perhaps he shouldn’t be either.

Maybe this is adulthood, he thinks. Acceptance. Not giving a fuck.

In June, Betty finally gets the promotion she’s been gunning for.

She also discovers, by pure happenstance, that Bret Weston Wallis—her peer, hired at the same time as her, with comparable credentials—is making at least five thousand more dollars per year than her.

 _This is_ bullshit, she thinks with a vehemence typically reserved for people who stand on the left side of the escalator, blocking the throughway and ignoring the sacred tenets of _stand right, walk left_. 

She leans against the corner of the elevator furiously texting Veronica.

 _Betty Cooper_ : this is bs im pissed i wanna rage

 _Lodge, Veronica_ : want me to arrange a hit?

 _Betty Cooper_ : yes

 _Betty Cooper_ : NO! no we can’t put that in text v!!

 _Lodge, Veronica_ : do u want me to have him murdered, jk jk just kidding mr nsa

 _Lodge, Veronica_ : better?

 _Betty Cooper_ : no

 _Betty Cooper_ : a small bit. At least i won’t get arrested now. hopefully

Her rage follows her all the way to her desk. She stares unseeing at her computer screen, at the article she should be editing but cannot focus on.

She thinks about the time Bret had called her a bitch at a work happy hour. It’d been under his breath, and he’d claimed he was joking— _it’s always a joke_ , she seethes. She thinks about their manager, how she’d sometimes see him walking the halls with Bret at his elbow. 

Then her mind goes clear. _I_ am _a bitch_ , she tells herself. _A bitch fucking gets shit done_. 

And then she sweet talks DuPont’s admin into adding her to the recurring editorial oversight meeting invite.

Jughead finally meets Adam Chisholm over drinks in July. Betty has been dating Adam for at least a month at that point. He remembers him, though, as the guy from Michigan she’d seen a few times last year. 

He thinks Adam is…perfectly decent. Adam is like the platonic ideal of who he imagines Betty ending up with. He’s clean and bright. He’s gainfully employed (Deloitte— _what is it with Betty and consultants?_ ) He lives alone, he seems polite enough. He’s got a Midwestern vibe. Jughead recognizes the type. 

Trula works on the Arts desk. 

Betty has learned from experience that she doesn’t have the best luck in setting Jughead up, but in September she tries again. He deserves happiness in his love life, she thinks, and in all facets of his life.

As a person, Betty thinks Trula is…she’s fine. It’s fine. She’s clever and she’s pretty; her mother is a writer, she herself seems pretty well-read. She has curly auburn hair. She smiles more than Betty expects someone dating Jughead typically might. But she rationalizes that might be good for him, might balance him out or get him to smile more. 

In truth, Betty thinks the person who might truly appreciate Jughead as a potential partner is likely a rare specimen. He’s so naturally prickly, a hard exterior with a soft, mushy inside, and a lot of people don’t appreciate the effort it takes to win Jughead’s trust and affection. 

Betty thinks that once Jughead welcomes you into his circle, that’s it. You’re in for life. 

She isn’t sure she can quite imagine Trula meeting that high bar. But she’s open to being proven wrong. 

Jughead’s phone rings.

Jughead’s phone only rings if it’s a telemarketer or Betty (JB always texts first), and a quick glance tells him it’s the latter.

“Babe,” he answers wryly, but instantly he realizes something is wrong when Betty doesn’t play along. And then he hears her sniffle down the line and the little hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

When Betty tries to speak, it’s guttural and throaty, and so laden in phlegm he hardly understands her.

“Betty, what happened? Are you okay?”

“Yes—yes, I’m okay. I just. I’m having a horrible day.” There’s a muffled noise, as though Betty is covering the speaker, and then he hears what sounds like a nose being blown. Betty returns.

“I just needed someone to talk to,” she tells him.

“Oh, babe—what happened?”

“Ugh, it’s everything—work, and my stupid boss, and then the train, and then... _Reggie_.”

“Did you run into him?”

“No—thank god,” she says, “I’d probably be a total mess if that happened.”

Jughead refrains from commenting on the obvious. Mentally he calculates how long it would take him to walk the blocks to Betty’s apartment in Bed-Stuy, if he should buy her favorite ice cream at his bodega and risk it melting before he’s reached her place, or take the chance and hope he’s able to find it at her bodega, a more unknown variable to him. He decides on his bodega, and he’ll take his bicycle to her place—it’ll be faster.

“No,” Betty is saying, “I saw—I saw his Instagram. He’s engaged.”

“Betty, you didn’t _want_ to marry Reggie, I thought?”

Betty wipes her nose before digging her spoon into the pint of Americone Dream Jughead had presented her with upon his arrival.

She shakes her head. “I didn’t,” she tells him through a mouthful of ice cream. She lets the vanilla melt onto her tongue, crunches the waffle cone pieces with her molars. “But…I don’t know.” She shrugs, and Jughead watches her quietly. “I just…didn’t think I’d be alone. Alone still.”

Jughead nodes. “Oh, babe. You’re—you’re not alone. You’re not going to be alone forever.”

Betty feels her throat begin to close and heat begins to prickle behind her eyes again. Jughead’s eyes widen, and he rises from his chair and circles the table to sit next to her. She covers her eyes with her hand, embarrassed to have found herself here, crying over a man _she_ left more than two years ago. 

She feels Jughead’s arm wrap around her shoulders, and she turns to bury her face into his sweater.

“Hey, hey,” he continues. “You’re the most wonderful person in the world.” He rocks her gently. His body is warm, and the wool of his sweater is soft against her cheek. She feels a flash of guilt that she might be ruining his sweater, the one he looks so nice in, too, but then she feels stupid. Jughead doesn’t care about sweaters or clothing. He’d tease her for even worrying. 

She feels him stroke the back of her head softly, and she breathes. 

When Betty’s tears have finally subsided, and a third of the ice cream has been shared between the two of them, Jughead turns on Betty’s television, in hopes of distracting her further.

He flicks through the higher number channels trying to find something decent to watch, and he hits pay dirt on TCM: _The Philadelphia Story_ is twenty minutes in. 

Jughead crosses his legs and props them atop the coffee table. Betty pulls a blanket off the back of her sofa, draping it over their legs. She leans into his side, and the weight and warmth of her is comfortable. 

“Sucks she doesn’t end up with Jimmy in this,” he says.

Betty leans back from him with narrowed eyes. “Are you serious?”

Jughead shrugs, confused. Betty shakes her head and resettles against his shoulder.

“You used to argue the exact opposite,” she tells him.

“Nah,” he says, “why would I do that? He’s the only one who sees her.”

Betty nods against his shoulder. “Exactly.” 

  
  


_VII._

“I’m sorry?”

Archie nods and his smile is so wide, Jughead wonders if the strain is painful.

“I want you to be my Best Man.”

But Jughead is still processing the announcement that Archie and Veronica are engaged. That they are getting married. They are going to have a wedding.

They’ve only lived together for a few months, they’ve been together— _what, a year?_ —and now they’re throwing all the eggs into the basket, like they’re both declaring _why the hell not?_

Jughead has to shake the fog from his brain. This is absurd. Surely this is absurd.

But Archie is still talking, describing the proposal (Archie hadn’t even picked out a ring yet, knowing Veronica would want them to choose it together), telling their parents (Veronica’s father had apparently cried; Archie isn’t sure if they were tears of joy or not. “He’s pretty inscrutable, honestly”), and honeymoon thoughts and guests and will _you be my Best Man_ and _Ronnie’s parents are throwing us an engagement party_ in a few weeks and Jughead—there’s no other word for it—spirals.

Trula dumps him two—no, three weeks before Archie’s engagement bomb. At the time it had felt like something they mutually agreed upon. They’d been spending less time together now that summer was over; he’d begun to forget to text her.

But now, suddenly, he feels panic.

So he calls Betty.

Betty pours Jughead a glass of malbec, sniffing to make sure it hasn’t turned into vinegar. She’s not one hundred percent certain when she opened it. Seems okay.

“I think—I don’t know,” she sips her wine. Jughead’s glass remains untouched on her tiny kitchen table. “It makes sense to me. V and Archie are really good together. Maybe it’s fast, but they’re both people who know what they want.”

Jughead eyes her, but he nods. “I guess.” He flips his phone over on the table. “Ugh, god. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize it was so late.

Betty swallows her last dregs. “It’s fine, I was aware. I would have had no problem kicking you out hours ago, you know that.” 

He smiles at her, and Betty can tell it’s one of his true Jughead smiles, the sweet kind. She loves his smile. It feels like a treat at this point. She feels proud when she gets one out of him.

“I should get home. Think I’ll walk, it seems mild out.”

Betty groans and rolls her eyes at him. “One of these days you’re actually going to get mugged, you know that?” Jughead scoffs. “You are! You take the direct route and you don’t even skip the shady parts. Oh, to be a man,” she laments. “Just stay,” she tells him.

She thinks the close of this conversation warrants a hug and so she exercises that friend privilege.

Jughead is, in Betty’s opinion, one of the top five huggers she’s ever had the privilege to know. His limbs are long and rangey, but he wraps them nearly double around you, and for such a string bean he projects the exact right amount of warmth.

They stay like that for an extra moment, and Betty doesn’t mind. It feels nice. He’s Jughead. 

When he pulls back just slightly, he looks down at her. He’s close, and she sees his eyes drop to her lips and then it feels only natural when their lips meet.

It’s lazy, this kind of kissing.

Technically this is making out, she thinks. She’s never made out with Jughead before, not really. It’s nice. It’s lovely. It’s really nice.

When he finally pulls away from her mouth, she keeps her eyes closed. She wants to stay here, she realizes. She doesn’t want this to end. 

She feels his breath fan over her face, his fingers brushing the hair at her temple back behind her ear.

“I’ll stay,” he whispers, and suddenly Betty knows this is different from before. This has a weight to it that didn’t exist before. She is unable to ignore the presence of that weight and so she gently extricates herself from his arms, because she thinks this warrants a conversation. This requires clarity. This needs intention.

“I don’t think…” she trails off. She doesn’t think she can fool around with Jughead again, if that’s all it’s going to be. She doesn’t know when she’s come to this realization, that Jughead isn’t just her friend anymore—Jughead is her person. 

Jughead’s the first person she wants to tell when something good happens, or when something bad happens, or when she’s embarrassed and needs to exorcise the feeling. 

Jughead is who she calls when she’s infuriated by her mother. She always wants to hear his opinion on movies, and books, and music. She disagrees with him a lot, but he hears her out. 

“Jug, I think we can’t just…have sex and move on…this time.”

“What do you mean?” His mouth is on her neck now, and everything in her wants to just close her eyes and let her body go limp, to let him carry her to her bedroom—or maybe even just the couch, it’s closer—and then to let him make love to her. To then fall asleep and then get breakfast in the morning at that diner, or maybe even make breakfast together. Maybe have morning sex. Maybe take a shower together. She wants to brush her teeth next to him.

This is where Betty’s mind goes when Jughead gently takes her ear lobe between his teeth and tugs, this is where her mind races when she feels something rumble where their chests press against one another and she realizes it’s her, that she’s moaning.

 _Betty_ , she tells herself. _Elizabeth, get your shit together._

With what feels like an inordinate amount of mental focus, Betty puts her hands on Jughead’s shoulders and presses against him gently. 

He pulls back instantly. _Ugh, I love him_ , she thinks, and that is what brings Betty’s brain fully into the present moment. 

Her eyes whip open and she stares up at him. _His_ eyes are heavily lidded, and his gaze is moving over her face, and she feels wanted by him. 

She physically bites her tongue in order to bring focus to her mind. 

“Juggie,” she says. He nods, and she feels his hand on her shoulder, the soft press of his thumbprint caressing the arc of her collarbone, back and forth, back and forth.

“It’s…it’s gonna be different this time,” she tells him, and he nods. She hopes he understands. “Do you…what do you think about—seeing what happens if we’re not just…friends. What if we try something else?”

His eyes narrow, and they focus in on her own. _Is this a staring contest_ , she wonders, but then lets herself blink, twice, rapidly. 

She stares at him and he stares at her, and then he leans slowly into her and meets her mouth with his. It’s soft and warm, and slowly his tongue licks into her and she tells herself _this isn’t an answer, Jug_ , and then he pulls back slightly. 

With his mouth still pressing to hers, “Yeah,” he says, “let’s do it.”

All her gentle thoughts about making love quickly go out the window because she feels a compulsive need to climb him like a tree.

When she hops, he catches her, and she wraps her legs around his waist, framing his face with her hands so she can kiss him with everything she’s got. His hands squeeze her ass, and though the logistics of undressing the person currently holding all your weight strike her as tricky, she’s suddenly also trying to push his jacket off his shoulders. 

“Take it off, please, take this off,” she says, and then he’s carrying her down the hallway to her bedroom. He’s so uncoordinated—and she’s still pushing at his collar, so she’s certainly not helping—that she only narrowly avoids the doorframe. 

Once in her bedroom, he drops her onto the bed and she bounces with the force of it. She’s pulling at her tights so messily she thinks she’s probably going to rip them, but she needs to get them off as fast as possible, because Jughead is kicking off his trousers and his shirt. She strips off her shirt as he pulls her skirt and underwear down together. They get tangled around her ankles, because she hasn’t gotten the tights off yet, and for a solid minute Jughead is kissing her while simultaneously trying to pull them free and then—“The _fuck_ ,” he says, “Jesus, what’s the deal with these things?” 

She laughs—she actually cackles—but she’s able to kick them off her legs and flip her body in order to crawl over her bed, reaching under the far side for the condoms she keeps in a storage box underneath her mattress. 

Jughead grabs at her ankles, and his fingers trail up her legs and between her thighs and then—she sighs and presses her face into her duvet, and he whispers _fuck_ , and his hand pulls at her hip and then she’s kneeling and leaning back into him and his hands feel like they’re all over her body, everywhere at once—between her legs, on her breasts, over the swell of her stomach—and his mouth is sucking at the spot where her jaw meets her neck, and she think _he remembers, he knows that I like that_ , and she laughs. 

Betty feels out of breath. She feels like she could sleep for fourteen hours. She feels like she needs to shower. She feels like she will definitely need to wash her sheets in the morning. She still feels wet. Her thighs feel sore. Her heart feels full. 

She rolls into Jughead’s side, and tucks herself under his arm, and falls into a deep, deep sleep that reminds her of being a child, of being safe, of being loved. 

Jughead’s eyes pop open at 7:34 in the morning, exactly. He knows because Betty is the last person in the world to use an actual alarm clock instead of simply the alarm on her phone, and he can see it on her bedside table. 

He’s in Betty’s bed. He can feel Betty’s breath against his naked chest and the warmth of her body where it’s pressed against his own.

He thinks about standing in her kitchen, about leaning down to kiss her, and about what she’d said to him.

 _Different_ , he thinks. 

Different.

He realizes nothing will ever be the same.

And then he panics. 

“Would you like to get breakfast?” Betty asks him, but her hand is moving beneath the blankets on her bed, and then he can feel her grip firm around him. She pumps once, slowly, and he tells himself to _focus, goddammit_. 

When he looks at her, her tongue pushes at the corner of her mouth and she looks like she’s suppressing a smile. She buries it in his shoulder.

“I think I should go,” he hears himself say.

She lets go of him. She slides slightly back from his body, but there isn’t much space for her to retreat in a double bed, so she’s still _right there_. 

“I’m sorry?” she says.

“I have to meet my editor.” He does not have to meet his editor. “I shouldn’t be late.” 

Betty’s mouth makes a silent _O_. She bites her lip and looks at his face, and Jughead can fucking see it, he can _see_ the moment he breaks her heart. 

He’s pulling on his jeans, and then he’s pulling on his sweater. Betty sits up in her bed. She’s naked and a little cold but she can’t even feel exposed or ashamed because all she can feel right now is shock.

“I just—I made a…a mistake,” he says. He shakes his head. “I thought I was supposed to meet my editor tomorrow, but it’s…it’s today.” 

It’s like a wave of cold water is rising to cover her, and Jughead kisses her cheek, and says _see you later_ , and then he’s gone. 

Jughead sort of…falls off the map.

Their standing Thursday afternoon coffee date passes with a simple text from him, begging off: another meeting with his editor, he tells her.

Betty has a full week at work—she’s wrapping up a months-long piece and is coddling her sources through the fact-checking process—and so the blow doesn’t hit as hard as she thinks it otherwise might. 

Still—she knows they need to address this, whatever _this_ is. She thinks about the moments before things got complicated, about leaning back and telling him that this was going to be different. She tries to remember her exact words; did she tell him she _wanted_ it to be different, or that she couldn’t _be_ with him if she wasn’t going to _be_ with him? Did she actually say the words, _let’s give it a go?_

She wishes she could rewind life, not to change anything (she doesn’t think she wants to change anything, wouldn’t take that moment away from her memory, the joy she felt and the bliss that followed), but she’d kill to know her exact words. She wants to figure out where exactly everything went wrong.

He’s avoiding Betty.

It goes against nearly everything that seems normal to him. Betty is a person he sees…he’s lost count, but surely several times a week, every week.

But now he hasn’t seen her since the… _incident_ , and with every passing day—with every passing hour, he thinks he’s fucking things up more and more.

His foolishness is coupled with the fact that he thinks he’s perhaps never known someone, physically, the way he thinks he knows Betty, and also that he’s likely never enjoyed being with someone more than he has the two times he’s been with Betty. One time, and he can convince himself it’s a fluke. Two times—well, that’s harder to deny. 

He manages to bury himself in edits. Eventually he does have an actual meeting with his editor, and the resultant work is a salve from reality. 

He loses all sense of time, going deep into the night on revisions, exchanging lengthy email exchanges with his editor about a dangling thread in his manuscript.

 _It doesn’t seem to make sense_ , his editor writes in an email; there’s no _actual_ reason why his protagonist cannot convey his emotional conflict to his partner. The mystery rests on a simple lack of communication. 

This is a little too on the nose, he thinks, even for him.

Betty calls on Sunday.

He lets the call go to voicemail. 

By the second Wednesday, Betty feels angry. 

_For fucks sake_ , she thinks. “For fucks sake,” she yells when her well-salted pasta water boils over onto her freshly-cleaned stovetop.

 _This is ridiculous_ she thinks. Betty Cooper is _not_ non-confrontational. Betty Cooper does not avoid conflict, or a necessary conversation. 

Betty Cooper knows what she wants. She knows she might not get what she wants, but she’s not going to leave what needs to be said unspoken. 

To Jughead’s understanding, in the pantheon of Lodge-sponsored events, the Lodge-Andrews engagement party is actually a low-key endeavor. 

It’s only been two weeks since Archie and Veronica announced their engagement, and therefore it’s been two weeks since Jughead massively fucked up the most consequential relationship in his life. 

The party is held at Veronica’s parents’ apartment on Central Park West. It’s a classic New York apartment and Jughead thinks if he wandered enough he would probably find servants’ rooms or a dumbwaiter somewhere around here. 

There is catering, and discrete platters of small hors d'oeuvres are floated around the room by waiters in understated black uniforms, as well as what appears to be a signature cocktail for the event. 

(There is not, Jughead is pleased to notice, a designated hashtag.)

There’s no possibility of avoiding Betty at this party. He is Archie’s Best Man. Betty is Veronica’s Maid of Honor. They are inevitably to be paired again and again going forward: engagement party, bachelor and bachelorette parties, rehearsal dinner, the actual _wedding_ and the reception to follow. 

He’s dug himself into a hole and he has no idea how to escape it. He thinks about who he’d ask for help in this scenario, and realizes that if it’s not Archie, Betty would be the person he’d run to in this moment. JB’s going to laugh her ass off at him, and then probably tear him a new one for being such a coward. 

And then there is a part of him that doesn’t _want_ to avoid Betty. She’s Betty. At this point, she’s his best friend, besides Archie. His past two weeks have been lonely; JB is out west, and Archie’s gotten caught up in wedding planning. 

He misses her. 

Jughead follows the edges of the room and avoids getting pulled into nearly every conversational group he passes. He hardly knows any of these people except for Archie’s parents, and yet somehow everyone seems to know he’s the Best Man. He ends up shaking a lot of hands, hardly remembers a third of the names of the people he’s introduced to. 

He’s only just managed to take a breath when the inevitable strikes. 

“Hey, Juggie.”

Betty’s at his right elbow. He swallows. “Hi. Yeah, good, I’ve been good. What about you? How’s work?”

Betty purses her lips, eyes narrowed, and he knows he’s going about this all wrong. 

“Jug, I think we need to talk.” Betty places her glass of wine on the table next to them, and grasps his elbow. 

He wants, with everything in his being, to not let her pull him down the hallway to the apartment’s kitchen, but he’s not even sure how he’d go about doing that. He’s not going to manhandle Betty in the middle of an engagement party. He’s sure as hell not going to make a scene at _Veronica Lodge’s_ engagement party. He’s not interested in getting murdered anytime soon. 

The kitchen isn’t empty; a few cater-waiters are pouring drinks or skewering hors d'oeuvres, and they pay Betty and Jughead no mind as Betty pulls him to the alcove that houses the kitchen table. She finally lets go of his elbow and Jughead realizes how firm her grip had actually been when his forearm pulses with fresh blood. 

“Listen, we agreed—we agreed it was different and it was going to _be_ different afterwards, and—and it’s okay if you changed your mind, I understand. But we need to have that conversation, Jughead.”

“It’s not that easy.”

Betty shakes her head at him. “It’s never fucking easy, Jughead, but you still have to say the words.”

Jughead’s eyes widen and his hands splay out into the air before him. “See, that’s just it, as soon as you have sex with someone, things get complicated.”

“Okay— _first_ of all, I am not ‘someone,’ Jughead. Second, _you_ made it complicated.” She prods his chest with her index finger. “You made it complicated when you said it was a mistake and then _ran away_ before we could talk about it—”

“Betty, I’m not—I’m not your _way station_ until the right guy comes around.”

Betty rears back like she’s been slapped.

“Fuck you, Jughead. Go to hell.”

And then she spins and storms out of the kitchen.

The cater-waiters pretend not to notice. 

In the living room, Betty hears the rising sound of tinkling glass, and realizes Veronica and Archie are about to speak.

From the center of the room, Veronica raises her glass. “Archie and I want to raise a toast in thanks to dear friends, Betty and Jughead—who are not only our Maid of Honor and Best Man, respectively, but who also brought us together. Had I and Archiekins found either of them even remotely attractive, we would not be here today.” 

The crowd titters with laughter, and Betty can sense Jughead slowing to a stop just behind her. She does not turn to face him.

Veronica raises her glass in their direction. “To Betty and Jug.”

The crowd echoes her at a murmur, and Betty swallows.

Jughead sends Betty two texts the Monday following what he’s begun to refer to mentally as _the argument_.

She responds to neither, and her read receipts are off (“Read receipts are for work and psychopaths,” she’d once told him), so he has no idea if she’s even gotten them. Surely she wouldn’t go so far as to block his number; they can’t have reached that drastic a point, he reasons.

But then, he isn’t really certain. Maybe they have. He’s never been in this situation before.

He resolves to leave her alone.

He lasts three days before thumbing to his favorite contacts list and tapping her name. He hesitates just before he does it, very briefly. 

It goes straight to voicemail. He doesn’t leave a message.

Less than a week passes and he finds himself, through no conscious planning, two blocks from her apartment.

He has a key, but he tries the buzzer. There’s no answer. It’s barely six p.m. and he rationalizes she’s probably working late; maybe she’s on deadline. He tells himself not to read into it.

He turns around and clomps back home in the rain.

_Jones, Jughead_ : Betty

 _Jones, Jughead_ : are you going to ignore me forever?

_Jones, Jughead_ : would you still like to see that screening of the apartment like we talked about?

 _Jones, Jughead_ : i purchased the tickets already, just let me know 

_Jones, Jughead_ : pork chops should be cooked @ 375 right?

It is, he thinks, the longest and loneliest three weeks of his life.

  
  


_VIII._

On New Year’s Eve, despite the temperature and the darkness and his general ill feeling, Jughead drags himself through Prospect Park on an ambling walk. 

He buries his hands in his pockets and thinks he’s an idiot for not wearing gloves. He already wears this hat almost everywhere, but he can’t invest in a pair of gloves? He really is hopeless.

He kicks at the salt that covers the path and thinks about his year. He thinks about last New Year’s, about staying the night at Betty’s and the morning they’d spent together, eating breakfast and talking about coffee roasts, or something equally meaningless.

 _What a strange year_ , he thinks. He could not imagine the trajectory the past twelve months have taken him on, and he mentally kicks himself. He thinks about who he was just twelve months ago, the people around him, and he realizes: he was happy. What an odd thought, he thinks—to realize you were happy only after the fact. 

And then Archie and Veronica moved in together. Betty set _him_ up with Trula, and then Jughead dated Trula. That was nice, in ways—Trula was whip-smart, but he somehow felt on his toes in a way that never quite felt comfortable. It fizzled out after a month or two. Betty was with Adam, and for a little while they were a matching set, Ken and Barbie—but then _that_ was over. He knows it was over by the time Betty told him her ex was engaged. And then Archie and Veronica got engaged, because _why fucking wait_ , he guesses—and then he fucked up his whole life. 

_His whole life_ , he thinks. Betty was so much a part of his life, he might as well have truly imploded the entire thing; it’s hardly an exaggeration. She is—she was, he corrects—so integrated into his daily life, and how he sees himself, and who he thinks he wants to be.

The first person he wants to talk to in the morning is Betty. The last person he wants to see before falling asleep is Betty.

And now it's ruined.

 _How odd_ , he thinks. He wanted everything with Betty except…

 _Oh_. He wants everything with Betty. There is no exception to what he wants to share with Betty. He finds himself about to think that he _doesn’t_ want romance with Betty, but in truth, he simply doesn’t want the romance he’s already experienced in life—what he had with Joani, and Jess, and maybe even Trula, for a minute—none of that comes close to what he’s _already_ _had_ with Betty. 

_Betty’s it_ , he thinks. The very thought frightens the hell out of him, but in the dark of Prospect Park, on the last day of the year, he decides. 

And now he just has to figure out how to tell her.

She’s not into this.

She doesn’t want to be here. 

She hasn’t missed a Veronica Lodge New Year’s Eve party in all the years since she first moved to New York, but this year her heart just doesn’t feel like it’s in it. She can’t shake the melancholy. The sun sets before four p.m. Her SAD lamp isn’t cutting it. She feels lonely. 

But she’s here; she’s a Cooper, she can fake it. Tradition, and all that. Veronica catches her eye from across the room and under Archie’s arm, and she smiles. Betty tries to mirror her, but her heart’s not in it and she thinks Veronica can tell. 

At about ten minutes to midnight, Betty slips out onto the roof terrace of Veronica and Archie’s apartment. It’s frigid out here, but she’s not the only one. Like every year, it’s the best place—for a midnight kiss, to see the fireworks, to welcome in a new year. 

It’s still somehow quieter out here, despite the cars on the street and the parties happening up and down the block. 

She leans on the railing that circles the roof and looks over the city, and thinks about what she wants from the next year.

She doesn’t get very far, because she hears a soft “Hey,” next to her, and when she turns, Jughead is there. He’s in jeans and he’s not wearing any gloves—typical, she thinks—and part of her wonders how pissed Veronica’s going to be when she sees he broke her dress code, but then another part of her thinks _who cares,_ I’m _pissed_. 

“Jug, what do you want?”

“I wanted to talk to you,” he tells her. 

He pulls his hat off and the only thing she can think to say in response is, “Your ears are gonna freeze.”

He shakes his head. “I needed to talk to you.”

“Jug, I don’t want to talk to you. I’m not in the mood to talk to you.” She waves her hand in front of her body, near her waist, like she can simply…brush away whatever is happening right now. She feels foolish. This is so embarrassing. She was so honest, so nakedly open and honest and vulnerable now all she wants to do is cry. 

“It’s important. It’s really important, I promise otherwise I wouldn’t bother you.”

“What?” she asks the question even as she shakes her head.

“I…” he begins. They’re just standing there, and from inside the apartment Betty can hear the countdown beginning, and the people outside on the terrace begin to pick up the chant.

“—eight! Seven!—”

“Juggie, you said some very hurtful things to me. I’m not exactly ready to forget that.”

He shakes his head at her and she can definitely see the blood rushing into his ears. The idiot.

“I know, and I regret that. I’m sorry I said those things to you.”

“I wish you could leave me alone, Jug. I don’t…I don’t want to do this right now.”

“Betts, please just listen to me—”

“—six! five!—

“Now? _Now_ you want to talk? What happened to ignoring and avoiding me? _Jesus_ , Jug.”

He wrings his hat between his hands, and she notices his knuckles are red, too. This man; he is hopeless. 

“I’m sorry, but it _takes_ a minute to decide you want to spend the rest of your life with someone,” he whisper-yells.

“—four! Three!—

Betty squeezes her eyes shut. “ _Jesus_ , Jug, it’s not the rest of our lives—we had sex, it’s not a fucking engagement.”

“Betts—” she feels his grip on her wrist, how his hand jostles her shoulder, and her eyes open again, and he’s so close she almost gasps, but she swallows it because he’s still talking. “Betty, it _is_ that, you’re not just a friend or a friend who I sleep with sometimes, you’re _Betty_ , and I’m saying I want to spend the rest of my life with you and I didn’t want to wait to tell you once I’d figured it out.”

He stops, and she stares at him. The clock hits midnight and everyone yells. She can see his Adam's apple bob, like he’s struggling to swallow air. He watches her, and she’s silent, and she can hear Auld Lang Syne as though from a very great distance—down a tunnel, several flights of stairs, that sort of distance.

She’s not sure how long she watches him watching her, but then he opens his mouth again.

“Betty, I want to spend the rest of my life with you, and I want the rest of my life to start now.” He pauses for a beat. She’s silent. “Betts?”

Betty squeezes her eyes shut again, and feels her throat begin to close up. All the signals are there—she’s going to cry, and it’s going to be messy.

“Betty—”

“ _Fuck_ , Jug!” she exclaims. 

When she opens her eyes, he’s frozen, eyes wide, like he’s afraid she’s going to snap. “Jesus!” She swats his shoulder with as much force she can summon, but the dam breaks. There’s snot falling down her nose and the height of these heels plus the glass of champagne she’s had puts her center of gravity off balance, so it turns out to be not much force at all. He hardly stumbles, and it’s just another annoyance to add to the list.

“Jesus, Jug—I swear to god—I just—you annoy me so—I want to hate you and then you go and say something like that I just— _ugh_ —!”

And that’s when her brain thinks _fuck it_ , and her hands reach up to his jaw, and she’s kissing him with everything she possibly has, snot and tears included.

Judging by the way his arms snake around her and squeeze her nearly breathless—he doesn’t seem to mind.

**Author's Note:**

>  _Harry_ : What does this song mean? For my whole life I don't know what this song means. I mean, ‘should old acquaintance be forgot.’ Does that mean we should forget old acquaintances or does it mean if we happen to forget them we should remember them, which is not possible because we already forgot them?  
>  _Sally_ : Well maybe it just means that we should remember that we forgot them or something. Anyway, it's about old friends.
> 
> The epigraph is from _The Philadelphia Story_. 
> 
> Thanks for reading.


End file.
